If there could be a space
where I would lose
the need to know things, it would be
the Crown Posada on a Saturday p.m.,
before the scores, while the records are
still turning, churning out their Eckstines
and their Inkspots, their Lenas and Lanzas
and their Peggy Lees.
Green Hindu entrails of the wallpaper,
soft lilies of the light globes,
plaster rhomboids of the roof-beams,
ceiling vermiculations and an entablature
of tobacco gold:
none of this drowns out
the sad lads pursuing
a coolness which does not inhere
to afternoon supping: they are
unable to see its
retro serenity. As one old bloke says
'It ought to be in black and white.'
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A woman slips off her shoe
and puts
her bare foot on the hot pipe
that runs along the base of the wall.
Men as they age discuss
the hernia swell of their hangovers
to something that smothers a day.
Babies who wish to smoke
bring in their mothers. |
Mirrors with dark wood frames,
with big bosses as though
walnuts could be wrinkled, brain-like breasts,
their glass cut with kinked lines and Victorian ivies;
mirrors lining the wall like windows
project you into that otherless zone
an overhead reflection where
all this is just for you.
That is the elsewhen, the Alice bar, in which
you cannot see the mutterer who wheezes,
Smiler, Eyecatcher, waiting to talk like a dog
waits for crisps. This is the man
who explains one-armed bandits,
who shot at the Mau Mau and got sent home,
who found a baby chopped like brisket.
If there could be a space where I was glass,
sitting at a ghost table, it would be there:
behind the illuminated page of these windows
within the beery book where
a glass stain woman pours
something in a goblet that
a glass stain man raises
to their fruitful tree.
Instead I step back to the afternoon, the
leap
of its arch, and the light enlarged by alcohol.
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